Yesterday we saw EW is back with some pictures to go with said cover story and there’s a lot of standing around and mouth open screaming whilst gun-shooting and I doubt any of it is going to boost your confidence in the film after yesterday’s unfortunately ugly first look.
I finally broke down yesterday and read the “twist” and spoilery part of EW‘s piece, which went as follows:
Twist No. 1? Sarah Connor isn’t the innocent she was when Linda Hamilton first sported feathered hair and acid-washed jeans in the role. Nor is she Hamilton’s steely zero body-fat warrior in 1991’s T2. Rather, the mother of humanity’s messiah was orphaned by a Terminator at age 9. Since then, she’s been raised by (brace yourself) Schwarzenegger’s Terminator–an older T-800 she calls “Pops”–who is programmed to guard rather than to kill. As a result, Sarah is a highly trained antisocial recluse who’s great with a sniper rifle but not so skilled at the nuances of human emotion.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds terrible and I think it all stems from the fact they simply weren’t going to make this movie unless Schwarzenegger was involved, or so producer David Ellison tells EW, “In our minds there was never a version of this movie that we were making without Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
Arnold seems pretty arrogant about the whole thing as well saying, “I knew Âeventually that another Terminator was going to get made… People always have to go through that painful experience of doing a sequel, or something like that, without me.”
Directed by Alan Taylor (Thor: The Dark World) and starring Jason Clarke, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Emilia Clarke, Jai Courtney, Byung-hun Lee, Dayo Okeniyi and Matt Smith, we learn the film comes with a $170 million price tag, which is less than the $200 million spent on the box office bomb Terminator Salvation, but that film was a box office bust even with Batman (Christian Bale) and Avatar stud Sam Worthington in the leads… is Schwarzenegger really that big of a draw as he plays robot Mr. Mom? I’d be quaking in my boots if I was Paramount right about now.
Oh, and don’t worry, there will be nods to the previous films, because those are always imperative to storytelling, “It’s like going on tour again if you’re Pink Floyd–the audience always wants to hear some of the old songs,” says Matt Smith (“Doctor Who”). “There are enough nods to the past that people will feel satisfied.”
This film will also go beyond the transforming of Jeff Bridges into a young Bridges in TRON: Legacy as they have created a “synthespian,” or synthetic thespian, using a body double plus scans of SchwarzÂenegger’s face from the first film merged with what his face looks like now. The result: an entirely CG head of the Terminator circa 1984. “It’s the holy grail of visual effects,” Ellison says. “You create a walking, breathing human that doesn’t exist.”
We’re almost to the point where we won’t need actors for these movies anymore.
The film is set for a July 1, 2015 release, check out a few more pics and yesterday’s covers below.
